Wednesday, February 9th, 2022 from 12:00-1:30pm PST

Queer, intersex, and transgender people have long held positions of spiritual leadership in many earth-based spiritual practices. Spiritual shape shifting through drag, costume, and clowning, carrying the knowledge of sacred traditions and healing, and walking between worlds have been the purview of the queers for millennia across cultures. Queer and transgender traditional spiritual practices have largely been displaced and violently shut down by encroaching heteropatriarchal monotheistic cultural mores. Modern queer feral spiritualities as exemplified by groups such as the Radical Faeries demonstrate themes of belief in the sacredness of the body, sexuality, the land and other living beings with which we coexist, as well as spiritual reclamation from and challenge of ultimate truth of the dominant spiritual paradigm. This community forum will discuss a history of earth based queer and transgender spiritual leadership, and a modern narrative of the use of sacred plant and fungal based medicines in queer spiritual ritual to expand and heal the self and the collective, to reclaim queer and trans people’s historical place in spiritual contexts, and to expand and redefine the epistemology of family, gender, sexuality, and other defining cultural constructs (description by Angela Carter.)

📷Dr. Beatriz Caiuby Labate (Bia Labate) is a queer Brazilian anthropologist based in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Her main areas of interest are the study of plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, religion, and social justice. She is Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines (http://chacruna.net, https://chacruna-iri.org, https://chacruna-la.org). She serves as Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and Adjunct Faculty at the East-West Psychology Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). She is also a member of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board’s Research Subcommittee, and Diversity, Culture, and Ethics Advisor at the Synthesis Institute. Additionally, she is a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil and editor of its site. She is author, co-author, and co-editor of twenty-four books, two special-edition journals, and several peer-reviewed articles (https://bialabate.net).

📷Justin Natoli, JD, LMFT (he/they) is a psychotherapist, Hakomi practitioner, and ketamine-assisted therapist in Los Angeles, CA. In their private practice, Justin specializes in depth and somatic psychotherapies, trauma, addiction, sex and intimacy, psychedelic therapy and integration, and working within kink, poly, LGBTQIA+, and creative communities. Justin received a JD from the UCLA School of Law and a Master’s in Depth psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute. They are currently training in psychedelic therapy and research through the AWE Foundation and CIIS.

This talk will be recorded and immediately available for rewatch for all attendees.

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Psychedelics and Queer Spirituality